Broken Promise

Ach, where’s all my time gone? December’s glut of posts now seems like a broken promise to the world in general.

So another brief filler post tonight, the second in succession.

Until I read this month’s Mojo, I had no idea that New Order had reformed last year, albeit minus Peter Hook. But the feature did send me back to the New Order LPs and I fished out the one that I hadn’t listened to for the longest time – ‘Brotherhood’.

Now it’s probably not a popular thing to say but ‘Brotherhood’ may be my favourite New Order LP.

To be honest, for whatever reason, I’ve always regarded New Order as a singles band. Sure, I like the LPs I own, but for some reason I just don’t quite think they ever made a truly classic album unlike contemporaries like the Bunnymen. But I’ve always thought quite fondly of ‘Brotherhood’ which completes the trilogy started by ‘Power, Corruption and Lies’ and ‘Low-life’. But song for song I do think that ‘Brotherhood’ matches and bests the other two.

I think my first introduction to the record was the band’s appearance on the Tube which featured (non-LP) single ‘State of the Nation’ (always one of my favourite mid period singles) and the much more rocky ‘Broken Promise’ from the record. And it’s that video which is going to provide the background to this post, albeit that ‘Broken Promise’ doesn’t even reach the fade it undoubtedly suffered at the end of the show.

Despite it being my favourite New Order record, ‘Brotherhood’ also turned out to be the last album I bought. I didn’t particularly take to any of the singles from its follow-up ‘Technique’ and what I heard of ‘Republic’ sounded just too polished for my tastes. Probably my biggie but, well, a boy’s only got so much time.

Which brings me full circle in this post!

A post on a new record next, promise.

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